Numbered lists can also be helpful in long lists so you can refer to a specific item you reference.

Marketing- generally uses bullets

Sometimes adding number (the following five things) limits editing.

If you are putting items in text and have more than 4-5 items listed, they should probably be bullet-ed.

NIH research shows that people on screen scan left to right for a few lines and then scan down left column and dip into text where they are interested.

Column and dip into text where they are interested.

This may indicate the need for bullets, on more screen vs. print.

When do you push back on customer when writing.

End user documentation

Look at plain English guideline

Part of our expertise is in communicating to specific user audiences, we need to identify audiences, do focus groups and assesment and determine what isn’t working(re hot like calls).

Then develop something.

Audience- identify this when looking at document maintenance, avoid “above” and “below” use

Modular layout: Helps with revising sections of a manual without reordering the whole manual

New TC professionals need to understand collaborative drafting. Learn how to write to your audience and what the end goal of the communication is supposed to be.

Cleint or management goals vs. user goals.-

Analysis,Composition, Editing

Time management/ bounding by time(hours) or by pages/words/ 250 words- make point to intelligent audience
400 words to make point to unintelligent audience

You can gauge total number of words vs. how many points I need to make.

To estimate a project, do an outline and estimate number of pages or hours for each subject

Maintaining lists- sometimes you need to view time to update vs. value of new content

Writing for the Hearing/Sight Impaired

Description:

Braille and Audio

Content conversion

Authoring considerations

Redesign issues

Thinking about content differently

Section 508 compliance

Scribe: Helen Sydawar

Top Takeaways:

Make sure the content is concise and well written

US-section 508 International-WCAG

Add alternative info or tags in source files-

avoid manual rework in Adobe Acrobat

Proof read all alt text

You tube auto captions need to be proofread and rewritten

Notes:

Section 508 compliance

Language usage- “select” vs “Click”

Fragment headings with important information up front

Use about section

Use Acrobat “Read Aloud” feature (available in Acrobat

Reader also) to see how text flows are rendered.

Using alt-text-make sure that it gets proofread

Standards- section 508 (US gov’t) WCAG (international)

Use Youtube capturing for roles as a starting point, but it needs to be proofed.

Daisy format for e-pubs

Acrobat has no “undo” for typing

Add the tag and alt information as early is possible (in source

Word or Powerpoint) and avoid post-processing in Acrobat when possible

Documentation Automation

Description:

Challenges

Issues

Planning and adjusting

Tools to automate publishing in multiple formats

Scribe: Danielle Villegas

Notes:

Architecture of the document itself – arch of content (how do they relate to each other) but also design of the page (formatting, how it looks); There’s the underlying model of the content, then how it’s applied with the design (topic, then topics arranged in maps, then visual design, etc.)

Anything you do over and over is something that needs a macro or assembling files over and over–that necessitates automation, whether it’s a tool or scripting. Many ways to automate the process. In web environments, it’d be CSS.

One of the difficulties is that we have multiple outputs for single documentation, and that can be messy, but certain products can help with that.

Unstructured content is more difficult to automate, but it can be done, depending on the tool. As long as you are consistent with how you format in unstructured, that can help a bit. Cleaning up top level tagging and such and minimizing renegade tagging to make things consistent can make a big difference.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to automate the reviewing process the same way that we can automate the production process.

Structured authoring environment helps with this process. XML is generally the standard for structured content, but some use MS Word, data from databases or CMSs or other formats.